SolveYourProblem Series: Bad Habits
I Want To Eliminate My Bad Habit...NOW!

Free Yourself From A Bad Habit - Change Your Priorities

Is it possible to free yourself from bad habits? Can people really change in any meaningful and lost-lasting way? Can I change myself? The answer to each of these questions is “yes.” But you can’t change in 24 hours, as some programs and self-help books promise.

My research, as well as my experience and common sense, tell me that anyone can change, but at the same time, I know that people need a compelling reason to change.

What does it mean to change? To change means to establish new priorities—to choose a behavior that’s different from the one we’re using now. I’m sure your story is filled with bad people or bad situations. But at some point you have to discard the factors, the people, and the situations that shaped you. Focusing on the past won’t help you solve today. At some point, you have to take responsibility for your own life.

I suspect that bad habits and bad choices are what brought you to this point—day after day and year after year—until you hit rock bottom. That’s always the way it is.    

Learning how to free yourself from bad habits starts with the realization that we cause our own feelings. I am the major cause of my own problems. The moment I grasp that simple fact, I’m ready to step into the process of self-change that will lead to freedom from the habits that keep me from living a more satisfying life. And when I’m free from my bad habits, the people around me will be free from the person I used to be.

All people can bring about superficial changes in themselves. But freeing yourself from a self-destructive habit like smoking or overeating requires a deep, long-lasting change. A bad habit is like an iceberg. You can’t beat the habit if you approach it as if it were only as large as what you can see on the surface.

Franz Kafka said, “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Any book or program that aims to help people break bad habits must reveal the whole iceberg that lies below the surface.

You can’t eliminate the whole thing in one day, but if you take a step-by-step approach, you can eliminate the bad habit sooner than you thought possible. It is going to take effort on your part.

You can’t eat whatever you want and lose weight, no matter how many times you hear it on the talk shows. But you can lose weight, and you can learn to enjoy healthy foods more than the unhealthy foods you’re eating now. 

You have constructed a verbal cage for yourself. Your definition of the problem seems to give you no choice; you avoid having to take responsibility for yourself.  That is how people get trapped in verbal cages of their own making. 

What's more is that you aren't necessarily conscious of the elaborate mechanisms you have constructed to hide the truth from yourself, but you are hiding it all the same. To free yourself from a bad habit, you must stop hiding the truth from yourself.

Overeaters, smokers, and chronic procrastinators have more in common with each other than meets the eye. We all go to great lengths to hide the truth from ourselves about the destructive nature of our bad habits; too often, lives and families are destroyed before we become aware of the verbal cages that keep us trapped in self-destructive behavior.   

Does professional therapy work? Can it help people break bad habits before the habit destroys their lives? The dropout rate is astonishing: 45% of clients who seek a professional therapist drop out of therapy after two or three sessions.

Do programs help? Millions of smokers have quit forever without following a treatment program. On the other hand, many people who try a smoking-cessation program are not able to quit, no matter how many different programs they try.

Some research suggests that for every person who quits smoking by following a treatment program, there are almost twenty persons who quit on their own.

What conclusion should we draw from all of this? It’s pretty clear, I think. You have a better chance of freeing yourself from a bad habit by becoming your own coach, by taking responsibility for your own program.

My goal is to give you the information and strategy that will empower you to free yourself from bad habits. Millions of people have succeeded in breaking a bad habit, and so can you.

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by SolveYourProblem.com : 2011

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